Do You Think Sheryl Sandberg Is Wrong About Husbands and Sex?

Mar 11, 2013 18:18

It's not everyday powerful women like Sheryl Sandberg write books. Her latest, "Lean In" she argues that women need to be more assertive in their careers, and fight against societal programming conditioning them to defer to men and scale back their ambitions and essentially giving up early. She argues that passivity is the reason there are so few women in power.

She notes that it is impossible to "have it all", and the most important career decision is who you marry.

And in what it seems a "way" to get men to pick up the load around the house, she said on 60 minutes that there are studies showing that men who do more housework have more sex with their wives.

Unfortunately, there's a recent study that suggests just the opposite. Men who do more housework have less sex.

Here's the summary from the study, which was published last year by the American Sociological Association. It was written by Sabino Kornrich, Julie Brines, and Katrina Leupp:

Changes in the nature of marriage have spurred a debate about the consequences of shifts to more egalitarian relationships, and media interest in the debate has crystallized around claims that men who participate in housework get more sex.

However, little systematic or representative research supports the claim that women, in essence, exchange sex for men’s participation in housework.

Although research and theory support the expectation that egalitarian marriages are higher quality, other studies underscore the ongoing importance of traditional gender behavior and gender display in marriage.Using data from Wave II of the National Survey of Families and Households, this study investigates the links between men’s participation in core (traditionally female) and non-core (traditionally male) household tasks and sexual frequency. Results show that both husbands and wives in couples with more traditional housework arrangements report higher sexual frequency, suggesting the importance of gender display rather than marital exchange for sex between heterosexual married partners.

Her book is an interesting read nonetheless, but like she says, you can't "have it all", after all. Right? What do you think? Should powerful women leave all the work at home to their husbands? Or like in these current times, share it together, as one would ideally like to?